by Jac Jemc
“Mrs. Khoury. How are you feeling?”
I chuff again.
“We hear you’ve had a rough go of it. Is your husband here? We’d like to talk to him, too.”
I signal.
“Okay, if we give you some information, can you share it with him?”
I nod as if it were the most obvious answer in the world, but behind the gesture, I feel a skip of worry that the forgetfulness will swallow what they tell me.
“Mrs. Khoury, we had both the drawings in Ms. Abbatacola’s home and the drawings at your house analyzed. Now, they match, but we also had them compared to the handwriting of you and your husband, and Connie, too, and there’s no match there.”
I hum. “So you believe us now that you have some harebrained version of proof? I’ll go ahead and walk further out on this limb and say, it doesn’t inspire much confidence when someone tells you they trust you because they’ve gone to great measure to prove they can. I’m not terribly accustomed to being doubted.”
“We certainly don’t mean to insult you, Mrs. Khoury. We haven’t ruled anything out. We’re trying to determine which avenues are worthy of our pursuit.”
“Even better. Tell me, have you found our neighbor?”
“We have not.”
“I could say I knew that would be the case but then you’d ask me how it was I knew.”
“And by that you mean?”
“You, sir, are the detective. How long do we wait for Rolf to return? What happens with his property? His belongings?”
“Don’t worry yourself about that. We’ll look for him until he’s found.”
I start to smile, seeing through their platitudes, knowing a grin will be read wrong, but I can’t call up the will to squelch it.
The detective eyes my wrong face. “Mrs. Khoury, I will remind you that any additional information you can give to us will be of the utmost help. We will uncover all of the relevant details, but you can help the timeline on which we do so by being forthcoming. That said, I understand you are currently in a fragile state, and I wish you a quick and uncomplicated recovery. Please let your husband know we visited and to contact us if he’d like to discuss the present situation.”
“I’ll do just that.” I intend nothing, ring for the nurse.
83
“THE DETECTIVES came by,” Julie tells me. I want to know more. She stays quiet.
The doctor visits. He says words. My hearing drops out over and over. I lose myself to the making of sense. “Temporal lobe epilepsy … Lying dormant for months, possibly years … During an attack … Jamais vu … ‘Never seen’ instead of ‘already seen’ … As if everything is strange, even home and family … Voices, music, people, smells, tastes called auras or warnings … Fright. Intellectual fascination. Artistic impulses. Delusions of grandeur and heightened religiosity. Even pleasure … You may think you’re speaking, but you’re not. You may think you’re silent, but you’re babbling … The temporal lobes—on each side of the brain at about the level of the ears where the seizure is focused … Some follow head injury or infection … Repetitive, automatic movements, like lip smacking and rubbing hands together … Spread to other portions of the brain … A convulsive, or grand mal, seizure … Completely or at least mostly controlled with medication … Candidate for surgery.”
I can feel Julie’s resistance without looking at her. Her refusal petrifies. I am grateful to have an answer that can explain her behavior. Her face, though, is pitted, stained with the shame of this defect.
“It’s certainly not easy to hear, but better to have an answer, right, Jules?”
She stays still. More doctors come into the room, young and curious. They bustle to introduce themselves. I take each of their hands. I try to commit their names to memory. I stare at the stitched cursive on their white jackets. Julie refuses to accept their introductions. The doctors flounder and regain their bearings.
“I have a question, Doctors,” she says. “Can you tell me where my bruises come from?… No, you can’t, because everything is more complicated than you’re making it out to be. If giving it a single name is some sort of comfort, well, lucky you, but I know there must be more. Go on, explain it all to me, since you have such a handle on the situation. Where does the mildew in our house come from? That’s the result of my brain shaking itself apart? And the passages that open up in our home? Go ahead. You reason it all out. I’m listening. Sure, I’ll sign off on a surgery. I’ll corrupt some document with my name so you can cauterize the tiny coils of my brain, if you can solve the mystery of more than just me jumping off a roof.”
The doctor listens. He looks at me. I can tell that he’s certain this is all in her head.
I want to believe it is, too. “Julie, maybe you should rest. This is a lot to take in. We can make a decision tomorrow.” I believe that treating her could be a start for us, a place to begin to heal and reorient ourselves, to zero in on why all of this began happening in the first place.
My tongue huddles silent in my mouth. The doctors say, “We’ll check in with you tomorrow then. Good night.” The light swings out of the room when they shut the door behind them. Julie and I fumble for ourselves alone in the dark.
84
MY BRAIN IS a flaking diamond, signifying rupture and unease. That is what I’m led to believe.
During the operation, two surgeons will take opposite ends of a coping saw and cut on the diagonal. They’ll isolate the temporal lobe, the temporoparietal, the temporoccipital, the amygdala: the icon of my behavior, approximately invisible in the company of the other brains. They will ride one horse on the carousel of their attention, and they will look only when they are passing at the correct point, but lacking nerve endings, a brain cannot feel. These doctors will worm their way through my memories, trespassers, passing through, agog at what should have been fatal decades, like rooms in an abandoned house. At any moment my circuits could wake up and engage, form the intrinsic ties they have always tied, push back and reciprocate. The building of my body could come alive. Each expert will touch pieces they don’t understand and classical time will lose meaning, as they spend almost a day pushing around up there, finally burning out.
I feel the need to trust their opinions, so that I can let someone else take control and try to fix things, but I cannot stifle the belief that it is me who best appreciates how my mind works, and it is me who best comprehends what I can live with and without.
In the morning, I tell them I refuse the surgery, and the doctors advise against this, saying my medicine has worn off, that the nosedive of chemicals has forced me into this decision. They tell me to wait an hour and see if I feel differently. But when should one make such a choice? On the drug-addled invention of a brain, or the scrambled twitch of a seizure? An ambulatory audience of physicians tells me who I am. After each of their efforts to convince me, I refrain.
85
ON THE EIGHTH DAY, Julie wakes up. I see her again, behind her eyes. Confusion and worry accompany her, but she is there. She is more exhausted on this day than the ones preceding it. It’s as if, in waking, she’s finally able to rest. I leave her alone. I go back home to see how it feels without her there.
I call Connie. I tell her Julie will be released. The surgery has been canceled. Connie pauses, as uncertain as I am that any choice could be correct.
I go online and research temporal lobe epilepsy. I learn that it’s possible all brains have scarring. I learn that the damage might never express itself. People live their whole lives without knowing it’s there. Temporal lobe epilepsy is a new diagnosis. The symptoms historically prompted the identification of any number of other disorders. I read about scientists claiming that Poe, Carroll, Van Gogh, Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard—all of them—are thought to have suffered from the same brand of dysfunction. The evidence pointing to these classifications have been culled from their writing and artwork. The diagnoses form in hindsight, with only imagination as substantiation. The whole thing feels less like a myster
y unraveled and more like a story being made up as it goes along.
I look up the allergen my body is reacting against: rye fungus, ergot. Formed on grasses and cereal grains, it lies dormant until spring or heavy rain create the proper conditions to trigger its fruiting phase. Ergot alkaloids cause a wide range of effects: restricting circulation and misdirecting neurotransmitters. Ergotism as another name for what is suffered when the mold has been ingested. A burning sensation that shows up in the limbs, the result of the constriction of blood vessels. Hallucinations and convulsions, nausea and loss of consciousness. Ergot extract is used to treat migraines and induce contractions and control bleeding and Parkinson’s until hearts start to leak. The span between hurt and help is not a span at all: a fine dotted line. With no way to be sure, people bind all sorts of frenzy to ergot. Saint Anthony’s fire in the Middle Ages, the Great Fear in the French Revolution, the hysteria of the Salem witch trials: everyone always looking for a solid answer.
I shut my laptop, and when my mind quiets with this new information, I hear the hum again, that chanting monotone that has no answer.
One can only identify something known; the unknown goes unseen. For every person diagnosed correctly, ten must be waiting for doctors to look past the possibilities they’re already aware of. For every symptom on a patient’s list, there are five that haven’t been noticed and five gimmicks. For every ten times you think you see a person for who they are, there is one instance in which you correct yourself and realize she is so much more. What other disorders and conditions and diseases might look like what we’ve gone through? Medicine and rest seem unreliable solutions now.
I am tired, though. For now, I decide I must stick with the answers that have been handed to me. I stop looking for more.
I head to the basement with my camera. I set up my tripod in front of the hole in the wall where I knocked out the stain. The mold still clings to the edges of the plaster. This home comprises a collection of openings. Each provides access to our lives. Terrifying clues propose who we are and what consumes us.
I want to ignore these items and move on. I want to point at Julie as the problem and forget all the other evidence. I want to forget that I tore our home in half and couldn’t stare at a work of art while remaining conscious. I want to blur this underscore of knowledge. I want my wisdom to attain a terrible flexibility. I want Julie to see how I’ve changed my mind. Incisive focus is no match for the dumb relief of a powerful resolution.
To be absolved of someone else’s sin while still wondering what evil lurks within you. To name fate with nouns instead of adjectives.
I take more photos. I say, “This is only one way it might be,” thinking of all the other ways. I’m either telling a lie or there are so many truths.
86
I RETURN HOME, still a bit loosened and unsteady, and the windows show the same warp, the light catching in the glass in different ways, the sunbeams circling, like a flashlight shifting and doubting softly, looking for proof. I can feel the pinching chill sneak around the frame, and then James opens his crooked mouth and asks me if a tooth of his is broken, and there’s not enough light to see, but I lie, “You should get it checked out.” He is buzzing hot, angry at the inconvenience, but I tell him not to worry, to rest and deal with it tomorrow, to forget action for now. I am happy to give him counsel, to feel that my opinion still counts. We live in the attempt to calm down for a moment, and I try to remember how to be near something without being worried by it and feel James’s eyes on me, wondering if he can trust. I would do anything to release them. I make a nest for myself on the couch. James delivers me the stack of magazines and catalogs that arrived while I was in the hospital and lifts my feet into his lap. He flips on a baseball game and hits mute. Normal feels like a performance today, but we fake our way through, hopeful we’ll grow into our actions.
On a commercial break, James says, “When you’re feeling better, we’ll sell the house.” I agree, but we keep talking, even after the game returns on the screen. We doubt selling the house will provide answers to all of our questions, if any. I keep an eye on James, hopeful that I have defined the farthest end of this spectrum for us, but curious to discover if my mind is telling me the truth. I know now what it is to feel myself slip away, but what I don’t know is how to move on with trust or how to be sure of what is solid. Like a pinball that moves backward with momentum as the bus it rides on moves forward, trying so hard to stay in one place. It is difficult to believe in any given trajectory, physics being an interpretation of the world and not an explanation.
I insist on making dinner the first night I am home. James has filled the refrigerator with guesses at what I’ll want. All the raw materials stock themselves side by side, but I am unambitious. I make a lazy chicken curry, overspiced because of my resistance to dirtying measuring spoons. I pour in more coconut milk to counterbalance the spices and call it a soup. “Compared to hospital sandwiches, this is gourmet,” he says. Yellow broth splatters his T-shirt as he slurps up a noodle.
I take myself for a walk. James offers to come with, but I ask to be trusted, only for an hour today. The grass has a bleached-out buzz, the summer sun having baked it dry. The forest is cooler, but the path is packed down and solid now. The wet spring leaves have dried and crushed themselves into dust. I listen for the children in the trees and hear, Cheer up! Cheer up! But then I see the robin singing the words. I search for proof that the world is one way rather than another, but it doesn’t matter what is coming from inside us or around us. Our brains allow it either way. We can lose ourselves behind a trapdoor, whether in our mind or in the house.
87
JULIE’S PALE SHOULDERS are narrow, fraught with freckles. I have the urge to photograph each spot individually. It would never end. She sits on the edge of the mattress. The pillows sag naked. Her hands clutch the ball of dirty sheets in her lap. I should have remembered to wash them before she returned home. I never do. She turns her head to look at me. She still has the ability to stun me with her attention. I hear noise downstairs. I remember I turned on the radio when Connie paid us a visit earlier. I left it on so softly I could barely hear it, but in this room it fires full volume.
Julie’s face is blue and friendly. She is sad and wants me to agree with her sadness. I look at her as if I know all of her angles. At one time I thought this was true. I remember us sitting on that couch in our apartment just months ago, perfectly cottoned. The white gold of availability around her irises strands her where she is. I know the tide will never pull me toward her. I am next to her, but away. She traces her eyes up to the ceiling when the tears form. I want to allow her to handle herself. I want to scoot toward her to welcome her to ask: for help, to be left alone, to be heard.
Julie chews the inside of her cheek. I can see it pulled in. I can see her jaw flex. A new habit? I pay attention. “I love you,” I tell her.
“Even now?” That flimsy grin forms.
“Yes.” We are many people. We separate. We tangle. We relock.
88
I NOTICE JAMES is wearing a loudly striped shirt he hasn’t put on in years, one we argued about his keeping before the move. I realize he must have lost weight, and then I see it in his face, too. The scraggly strays of the top edge of his beard—the ones I wonder why he doesn’t shave off—hide the new concavity of his cheeks. I wonder which worry has caused this. Did it start with the gambling or the house or when I went into the hospital? How long have I failed to notice him changing?
On the table, James has laid out the Realtors he’s been researching. We agree we don’t want to work with the man who sold us the house. James has put together a rough budget for improvements, researched home equity loans. He’s been doing math, and from what I can see, his plan is sound: we could make money from a sale. I am touched by the effort this must have taken him, but I am still preoccupied with my own errors.
“I’m sick, but it’s not just me. You can agree with that, right?”
“Of course,” James says.
I dip my head, as if this were something I, too, am sure of, but I am uncomfortable with how all my lines of thought refuse to reconcile. If James is also sick, then no one here is well. I would prefer not to take all of the blame, but if we’re both not sick, then something is haunting us, not only this place, but the woods, and the beach, and the house next door, and our memories and logic. There is still a chance that everything might be true, that we both might be filled with scars and substances that cause our synapses to fire inefficiently, that cause us to make decisions that are unwise and fantastic, and to believe what shouldn’t be believed, but that is not to say that the world outside our minds is reasonable. That is just to say there is no sense in knowing where the line is drawn. We can mark the place that indicates This is how much we can take; we can monitor it, but that line, nevertheless, constantly moves.
89
JAMES AND I go to the neighbor’s house and find the door locked, so we break a window. We fidget, but we get the job done. We find clues smirking everywhere: images of our home from decades before, family photos in what appears to be a timeline on the mantel, and we wonder how we missed them before: An engagement photo. Parents—baby. Parents—small boy—baby. Parents—two small boys. Parents—one boy. Parents—one boy—one baby. Parents—one boy—one girl. A father—two children. Two children as teens, alone. We read them like a story. We put together our version of the tale, the one we plan to spout confidently at grocery stores and bars. The family lost a boy and had a third child, but the girl was her own, could never replace the son who’d died. We realize that every story we heard in town might have truth, but we decide that just because this assumption we’ve formed about this story is our own doesn’t make it any more legitimate or reliable than those we were told, and so we keep hunting.